RC Deportivo de La Coruña: the absurdity of abnormalizing the Spanish language in Galicia

These days there is a lot of talk in the media about the possible name change of Real Club Deportivo de La Coruña.

Place names in Spanish in Galicia, Hispanophobia, and trash journalism
“Your language sounds wrong”: the nationalist stupidity that many people have assumed

That sports club, about to celebrate its 120th anniversary, is considering changing its name to "RC Deportivo da Coruña". As a private company, the decisions its members make regarding the club's name are theirs alone. In Galicia there are two official languages, Spanish and Galician, and there should be freedom to choose which one to use for a company's name. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with using Galician in a name. In fact, the title of my blog, "Contando Estrelas" (Counting Stars), is in Galician, and it also has a Galician language edition.

That said, what is regrettable in the case of Deportivo is the political interference. Separatism has been demanding a name change from that club for many years because it does not tolerate the use of Spanish place names in Galicia. It must also be said that this pressure is not exclusive to separatism: there are Galician media outlets that dedicate themselves to ridiculing Spanish place names in Galicia, openly promoting a Hispanophobia that seeks to normalize the Spanish language, which is one of the two official languages ​​of this community.

This situation is further fueled by discriminatory legislation supported and maintained for years by the Popular Party (PP), a detail that many media outlets in the rest of Spain tend to ignore when talking about this region. This legislation excludes Spanish place names from official toponymy, creating institutional pressure against them and effectively turning Spanish-speaking Galicians into something like foreigners in their own land, people who have no right to call the places where they live by their own language, even when we are talking about place names as old as "La Coruña", a name that originated in the Middle Ages, that is, in the time when Vulgar Latin began to give way to the languages ​​we know today as Spanish and Galician.

When we talk about a legal, institutional and political environment like this, the removal of Spanish place names is no longer a free decision, but the result of pressure campaigns that are also fueled with our tax money.

If I, for having a blog with a Galician name, were subjected to a campaign like that to change it, the last thing I would do is give in to the pressure. Firstly, because I refuse to make any decision under anyone's pressure, but also because when you give in to those who promote a coercive linguistic environment, the enemies of freedom are the ones who win. And I call them that because they don't want a Galicia where everyone can freely decide which language they want to speak, use to socialize, study, or conduct business. They want to decide for us even the language we use every day.

The big difference between this blog and that sports club is that in Galicia there is growing political pressure to displace Spanish from public life. It is an absurd and grotesque situation, considering that despite the insistent institutional campaigns to promote the use of Galician, including initiatives to pressure school children to stop speaking Spanish (something that seems purely pathological to me), the language of Cervantes is the most spoken language in Galicia, a clear sign of the failure of social engineering.

This Hispanophobic pressure is even more grotesque in certain cities, where Spanish is by far the most widely spoken language. According to a 2023 survey, in A Coruña, Galician is used exclusively by only 15.48% of its inhabitants, four and a half points less than five years earlier. Only Vigo (13.46%) and Ferrol (13.60%) surpass the capital of A Coruña, and they too are losing speakers.

Thus, when some try to make Spanish a foreign language in Galicia, they are not only trying to make our language abnormal: they are trying to make the majority of the inhabitants of Galicia's two most populated cities (Vigo and A Coruña) abnormal. It is curious to note that in a democratic society so sensitive to hate speech, that discriminatory policy has the blessing of parties and media outlets that consider themselves great champions of tolerance, but who react with a totalitarian intolerance every time they see a Spanish place name in Galicia.